On a Saturday afternoon search for creative inspiration, Diana and I recently went to the public library to check out an assortment of classic children’s books. We didn’t go with any particular list or agenda — it was more of a seat-of-the-pants perusal to find books that either we recognized from our own childhoods or that the library staff had helpfully marked as worthy of note. As we lugged multiple armloads of books up to the puzzled circulation librarian I realized that we might have become a bit carried away in our enthusiasm (“No seriously, it’s for science”), but at least we wound up with enough books to constitute a statistically rigorous sample. And actually, a closer look at the books that we picked out revealed a couple of commonalities that were quite interesting.
A children’s book with creative teeth
First, it’s a curious but unmistakable fact that a disproportionate number of the best children’s authors are British. Second — and I actually suspect that this latter point relates closely to the first in an interesting way — the best children’s books read much more like books for full-grown adults than you might remember. Here’s an example from the very first page of The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, a long-standing favorite book for late elementary-school-aged kids:
It was dusk — winter dusk. Snow lay white and shining over the pleated hills, and icicles hung from the forest trees. Snow lay piled on the dark road across Willoughby Wold, but from dawn men had been clearing it with brooms and shovels. There were hundreds of them at work, wrapped in sacking because of the bitter cold, and keeping together in groups for fear of the wolves, grown savage and reckless from hunger.
Snow lay thick, too, upon the roof of Willoughby Chase, the great house that stood on an open eminence in the heart of the wold. But for all that, the Chase looked an inviting home–a warm and welcoming stronghold. Its rosy herring-bone brick was bright and well-cared for, its numerous turrets and battlements stood up sharp against the sky, and the crenelated balconies, corniced with snow, each held a golden square of window.
- The Wolves of Wiloughby Chase, by Joan Aiken
Not bad, right? I actually hadn’t read this book when I was a kid, but with a first page like that I had to check it out. The rest of the story (which I haven’t finished yet, so don’t spoil it for me) continues in much the same vein, and two features are consistently striking. First, the vocabulary. Granted, some of the challenge here comes simply from the fact that the book is written in formal British English, circa 1962. However, I don’t doubt that even a ten-year old reader in the 1960s, situated much closer to the books geographic and cultural origins, would still have found plenty here to be challenged by (actually, I’ve learned a fair number of new words in the first hundred-odd pages myself). The author Joan Aiken, a prolific writer of books for both children and adults, is wonderfully stubborn in her refusal to dumb down her lexicon. It may be a story for young children, but it’s one that the intended audience is going to have to really stretch their linguistic range to get through.
Looking a bit deeper, the second thing that is immediately striking about Wolves (and which, again, continues throughout the story) is the story’s tone and emotional range. Think about these qualities in relation that iconic purple dinosaur that I wrote about last time. Barney, bless his well-intentioned fuzzy heart, is the standard bearer for a very mono-emotional view of children’s media. It’s a view which maintains that if a certain subject or theme is not 100% “safe” — i.e. incontrovertibly cheery, non-threatening, lacking in sharp corners, etc. — then it should not be a part of a narrative world for children. This principle is one that certainly seems reasonable enough on the surface, but as Wolves demonstrates, it’s also a rule that some of the enduring classics of children’s media don’t obey. Already on page 1 of Wolves, we’re learning about fearful animals, “savage and reckless from hunger.” Twenty-three pages later, one of these beasts — with “a pointed gray head, red slavering jaws, and pale eyes gleaming with ferocity” — throws itself against the window of the train car in which Sylvia (one of the young main characters) is making her first independent rail voyage. It’s edgy stuff for a kid’s book, no doubt about it. Yet Wolves has entertained generations of children since it’s first publication almost fifty years ago. It has endured across decades and outlasted fads. Barney may be safer and less challenging, but somehow I doubt we’ll see kids enthusiastically checking out his DVDs from the local library in 2060.
The point that I’m trying to illustrate here is simply that the best children’s media challenges children rather than patronizing them; it stretches their awareness — verbally, emotionally, and otherwise — in the same way that grown-up literature stretches our own. This is something that has to be done thoughtfully, and of course there are limits. But in a media age of increasingly homogenized, pasteurized, and watered-down children’s content, I think it’s worth remembering that the whole point of imagined worlds is to stoke the imagination and creativity, to be a catalyst for growth rather than stasis.
What do you think? What books do you remember most fondly from when you were a child? Please leave your comments below!
